One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America

Conventional wisdom holds that America has been a Christian nation since the Founding Fathers. But in One Nation Under God, historian Kevin M. Kruse argues that the idea of "Christian America" is nothing more than a myth - and a relatively recent one at that.

The Untold History of the United States

Aided by the latest archival findings and recently declassified documents and building on the research of the world’s best scholars, Stone and Kuznick construct an often shocking but meticulously documented "people’s history" of the American empire that challenges the notion of American exceptionalism. Stone and Kuznick will introduce listeners to a pantheon of heroes and villains as they show not only how far the United States has drifted from its democratic traditions but the powerful forces that have struggled to get us back on track.

Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

To most of us, learning something 'the hard way' implies wasted time and effort. Good teaching, we believe, should be creatively tailored to the different learning styles of students and should use strategies that make learning easier. Make It Stick turns fashionable ideas like these on their head and will appeal to all those interested in the challenge of lifelong learning and self-improvement.

The Great Divide: The Conflict Between Washington and Jefferson That Defined a Nation

History tends to cast the early years of America in a glow of camaraderie when there were, in fact, many conflicts between the Founding Fathers - none more important than the one between George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Their disagreement centered on the highest, most original public office created by the Constitutional Convention: the presidency. It also involved the nation's foreign policy, the role of merchants and farmers in a republic, and the durability of the union.

Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War

From the perilous ocean crossing to the shared bounty of the first Thanksgiving, the Pilgrim settlement of New England has become enshrined as our most sacred national myth. Yet, as best-selling author Nathaniel Philbrick reveals in his spellbinding new book, the true story of the Pilgrims is much more than the well-known tale of piety and sacrifice; it is a 55-year epic that is at once tragic, heroic, exhilarating, and profound.

The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence

While the world has made encouraging strides in the fight against global poverty, there is a hidden crisis silently undermining our best efforts to help the poor. It is a plague of everyday violence. Beneath the surface of the world’s poorest communities, common violence—like rape, forced labor, illegal detention, land theft, police abuse and other brutality—has become routine and relentless. And like a horde of locusts devouring everything in their path, the unchecked plague of violence ruins lives, blocks the road out of poverty, and undercuts development.

Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

Author and historian Tom Holland returns to his roots in Roman history and the audience he cultivated with Rubicon - his masterful, witty, brilliantly researched popular history of the fall of the Roman republic - with Dynasty, a luridly fascinating history of the reign of the first five Roman emperors.

The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia

Andrei Lankov has gone where few outsiders have ever been. A native of the former Soviet Union, he lived as an exchange student in North Korea in the 1980s. He has studied it for his entire career, using his fluency in Korean and personal contacts to build a rich, nuanced understanding. In The Real North Korea, Lankov substitutes cold, clear analysis for the overheated rhetoric surrounding this opaque police state.

The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World

Russell Gold, a brilliant and dogged investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal, has spent more than a decade reporting on one of the biggest stories of our time: the spectacular, world-changing rise of "fracking". Recognized as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and a recipient of the Gerald Loeb Award for his work, Gold has traveled along the pipelines and into the hubs of this country’s energy infrastructure; he has visited frack sites from Texas to North Dakota; and he has conducted thousands of interviews with engineers and wildcatters, CEOs and roughnecks, environmentalists and politicians.

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

From a master chronicler of legal and financial misconduct, a magnificent investigation nine years in the making, this book traces the political intrigue and inner workings of the Catholic Church. Decidedly not about faith, belief in God, or religious doctrine, this audiobook is about the church's accumulation of wealth and its byzantine entanglements with financial markets across the world.

Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade

In Junkyard Planet, Adam Minter - veteran journalist and son of an American junkyard owner - travels deeply into a vast, often hidden, multibillion-dollar industry that's transforming our economy and environment. Minter takes us from back-alley Chinese computer recycling operations to high-tech facilities capable of processing a jumbo jet's worth of recyclable trash every day. Along the way, we meet an unforgettable cast of characters.

Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil

For millennia, fresh olive oil has been a necessity - for food, medicine, beauty, and religion. Today's researchers continue to confirm the remarkable, life-giving properties of true extra-virgin, and "extra-virgin Italian" has become the highest standard of quality. But what if this symbol of purity has become deeply corrupt?

The War That Forged a Nation: Why the Civil War Still Matters

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James M. McPherson considers why the Civil War remains so deeply embedded in our national psyche and identity. The drama and tragedy of the war help explain why the Civil War remains a topic of interest. But the legacy of the war extends far beyond historical interest or scholarly attention.

Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and The War Years

Originally published in six volumes, which sold more than one million copies, Carl Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln was praised as the most noteworthy historical biography of Sandburg’s generation. He later distilled this monumental work into one volume that critics and readers alike consider his greatest work of nonfiction, as well as the most distinguished, authoritative biography of Lincoln ever published.

Growing up in an Illinois prairie town, Sandburg listened to stories of old-timers who had known Lincoln. By the time this single-volume edition was competed, he had spent a lifetime studying, researching, and writing about our 16th president.

400 Things Cops Know: Street-Smart Lessons From a Veteran Patrolman

400 Things Cops Know shows police work on the inside, from the viewpoint of the regular cop on the beat - a profession that can range from rewarding to bizarre to terrifying, all within the course of an eight-hour shift. Written by veteran police sergeant Adam Plantinga, 400 Things Cops Know brings the listener into life the way cops experience it - a life of danger, frustration, occasional triumph, and plenty of grindingly hard routine work.

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

In The Half Has Never Been Told, historian Edward E. Baptist reveals the alarming extent to which slavery shaped our country politically, morally, and most of all, economically. Until the Civil War, our chief form of innovation was slavery. Through forced migration and torture, slave owners extracted continual increases in efficiency from their slaves, giving the country a virtual monopoly on the production of cotton, a key raw material of the Industrial Revolution.

The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945

This Pulitzer Prize-winning history of World War II chronicles the dramatic rise and fall of the Japanese empire, from the invasion of Manchuria and China to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Told from the Japanese perspective, The Rising Sun is, in the author’s words, "a factual saga of people caught up in the flood of the most overwhelming war of mankind, told as it happened - muddled, ennobling, disgraceful, frustrating, full of paradox."

To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949

The European catastrophe, the long continuous period from 1914 to1949, was unprecedented in human history - an extraordinarily dramatic, often traumatic, and endlessly fascinating period of upheaval and transformation.

Publisher's Summary

A brilliant young scholar's history of 175 years of teaching in America shows that teachers have always borne the brunt of shifting, often impossible expectations.

In other nations, public schools are one thread in a quilt that includes free universal child care, health care, and job training. Here, schools are the whole cloth. Today we look around the world at countries like Finland and South Korea, whose students consistently outscore Americans on standardized tests, and wonder what we are doing wrong. Dana Goldstein first asks the often-forgotten question: "How did we get here?" She argues that we must take the historical perspective, understanding the political and cultural baggage that is tied to teaching, if we have any hope of positive change. In her lively, character-driven history of public teaching, Goldstein guides us through American education's many passages, including the feminization of teaching in the 1800s and the fateful growth of unions, and shows that the battles fought over nearly two centuries echo the very dilemmas we cope with today.

Goldstein shows that recent innovations like Teach for America, merit pay, and teacher evaluation via student testing are actually as old as public schools themselves. Goldstein argues that long-festering ambivalence about teachers - are they civil servants or academic professionals? - and unrealistic expectations that the schools alone should compensate for poverty's ills have driven the most ambitious people from becoming teachers and sticking with it. In America's past, and in local innovations that promote the professionalization of the teaching corps, Goldstein finds answers to an age-old problem.

I appreciated how this helps put into contact things I experienced as a teacher . Unprofessional tasks and data driven tasks consume time and energy that should be spent teaching students. This is a reminder that this is a job for professionals and thus needs to be treated professionally. Testing to target instruction is important when it has a place to help children learn. Learning from other teachers and sharing best practices is something to value, it was nice to hear more about it. Listening to this book on audible while driving home from work really allowed me to process the bigger picture and understand what teachers have faced all over the country throughout history.

This book is for anyone with an interest in education reform, especially policy makers, administrators, teachers, and parent activists. I love the mostly objective presentation of the facts, but also was pleased to hear the author's recommendations in the prologue.

Gain a better understanding of philosophical and political trends in the education systems of America. Why it is decentralized, yet prone to national political shifts; how students, teachers, and administrators are evaluated. Interesting and well reasoned, without becoming a diatribe, as the title suggests.

Where does The Teacher Wars rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

This is one of the most enjoyable non-fiction books I've listened to. I recommend it to anyone with an interest in teaching and public education.

What was one of the most memorable moments of The Teacher Wars?

One of the most interesting revelations of the book is the conclusion, largely implicit, that the reason why American teachers are not respected or given much latitude to teach as they see fit is in part due to the legacy of American teachers largely being poorly educated themselves, particularly in the earliest years of American schools. It is also fascinating to learn there is evidence that it seems to make little difference what path individuals take in terms of training. Furthermore, this book also reveals the intriguing commonalities between public school teaching and factory work.

Interesting information (I am a retired teacher), but I wish there could have been a more exciting story line. More like an assignment to read in an education class. This is not a criticism of the author, I simply had different expectations. I agree we are not receiving the "best and the brightest" teachers in the classroom and we never have, although almost every teacher I know is a passionate soul who really cares about children and is open to new teaching methods. Unfortunately, today the rigid control and demand over teacher performance is completely unrealistic. I am glad I got out when I did. Everyone should be nervous about big business hiding behind charter schools.

This is an absolutely amazing book and a must read for anyone in our interested in the education field. As a teacher it helps to know where the education system came from to help determine where it's going.